I agree with you on synchronicity, Sealchan. Even in my early Jungian days when I was less scientifically oriented, I never took to synchronicity (as most Jungians understand it). Synchronicity as a
psychological principle, I am totally OK with. That is, (as you also described in different terms) when we are keyed in to certain phenomena that relate to some point of mental fixation (like a complex we are working with), we are more likely to notice and assign patterns to random events that render them meaningful. But these thoughts, feelings, and events are meaningful only subjectively, only to the individual perceiver. They are not objectively meaningful or indicative of an extra-psychic connecting principle (although others may be capable of understanding the pattern the perceiving individual has recognized/attributed).
Even today, Jungians are very big on synchronicity . . . and in truth, I've always found this disappointing and seen it as something of a bad habit that they will have to get over if Jungian psychology is ever to evolve enough to meet up with the modern (and primarily scientific/naturalistic) world of human thought. Jung meant for synchronicity to be truly "modern" (a psychological parallel of quantum physics), but it has stood almost from the beginning as an archaism, a bit of spiritualistic thinking only entertainable when divorced from scientific reasoning and analysis.
The text "Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle" is quite a curiosity. It's admittedly been years since I last read it, but my recollection is that Jung goes through a number of parapsychological "studies" and speculations (including, I do remember, an attempt to apply astrological chart readings to historical world events). But instead of taking a fully "mystical" (and belief based) stance on these things, he tries to evaluate them at least quasi-scientifically . . . perhaps as if to prove to his more skeptical self that such things are valid natural phenomenon and not subjective projections and wish fulfillments. The book is a weird collision of Jung at his most scientific and simultaneously at his most parapsychological/spiritualistic. These two Jungs seem to be having a kind of brotherly scuffle with one another. And no one really wins. Some of the parapsychological data, Jung himself realizes, does not hold up to scientific scrutiny. Other items (e.g., ESP studies) that he relates "scientific" data for were later on debunked by stricter, more error-proof scientific studies.
Ultimately, the essay/book is a failure. I.e., it fails to demonstrate that there is any scientific basis behind parapsychological ideas like synchronicity. And yet, I have never heard another Jungian really admit this . . . at least not clearly and definitively.
The way Jung splits into "two part-Jungs" in "Synchronicity" makes me think that he was wrestling with a complex. It has been my theory for a few years or so now that these two Jungs were always engaged in the construction of analytical psychology (and that their dialog with one another became the body and soul of analytical psychology . . . much as Jung's dialog with his inner psychic Others in the Red Book produced the skeleton of analytical psychology). I'm not sure if they are directly related to the Number One and Number Two personalities he describes having (from an early age) in
Memories, Dreams Reflections. But I do feel pretty certain that Jung himself was aware of this dual-mindedness in his personality and work.
It has always been the Jungian belief (and unquestioned assumption) that Jung's later works were his "deepest" and "most mature". That would be "Synchronicity",
Aion,
Mysterium Coniunctionis, and "Answer to Job". I disagree and suspect this assumption comes mostly from a strong bias that favors the "progress" of the "second half of life" in Jungian thought and identity . . . a kind of pro-senex bias that despises the puer and underestimates youth and its creative capacity and energy. Of course, it is much more typical in creative people for them to "peak" and have a prime that rarely extends into their later years (past age 60 or even 50). There are some exceptions, of course, but the norm is that creative people do their most revolutionary and influential work before age 50 . . . and often in their 20s and 30s. The privileging of the "wisdom" of later life in Jungian thought is, in my opinion, the product of a complex rather than an actual scientific observation.
My opinion of Jung's late work is that it does not represent his best thinking. This is not at all to say that it is "weak" or worthless. I think there is great value in Jung's late work
for Jungians. This is because Jung's late work begins to deviate from the synchronized dual-mindedness that characterized most of his work from the 1920s to the 1950s. Those two minds (the mystic and the scientist) worked together very well for decades, each one balancing the other . . . or in Jung's own terminology, he preserved the "tension of the opposites". But in his last decade or so (perhaps after his heart attack in 1944, especially), Jung seemed to lose the "heroic energy" to hold the "tension of the opposites" together. I think he became less interested in being a "public intellectual", theorist, and psychologist, and more interested in his own residual spiritual or individuation journey. The one thing that all of Jung's late work has in common that most of his earlier work lacks is a sense of Jung-the-man's personal struggle to understand himself and his fate.
He wrestles with God in "Answer to Job". He wrestles with the implications of mystical transformation in
Mysterium. In Aion, he wrestles with Christ (and Antichrist). In "Synchronicity", he pits his scientific phenomenologist self against his mystical self and fights to a stalemate. But I don't think his heart was in the science/psychology anymore at that point. He was looking to settle the outstanding pieces of relationship with his God. I have sympathy for that, but it frustrates me that Jungians take this late attempt of Jung to "find himself" as a commandment or absolute truth . . . as "doctrine". Jungians lose the capacity to look on Jung's late life psychologically, i.e., as though it were a single man's personal experience and encounter with what, after a long life, he himself "means". Before this, Jung spent decades being the "great man", the intellectual achiever . . . even (to many Jungians) a modern prophet. But that was all "for the world" or for others or for reputation or "the common good" of "intellectual history". I think Jung had unfinished business reckoning with himself (the Red Book also suggests that this would be inevitable, because it ends with inflation and an exiling of the psychic Other . . . that Other that is the only one capable of introducing Jung to himself utterly and away form the context of ego, identity and tribe).
So, if you want to understand Jung the man, read these late works carefully and as though they were the subjective testimony of a man trying to understand himself. But if you want to understand analytical psychology, read the prior works like
Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious,
Psychological Types,
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, and his various writings on dream analysis, analytical method, psychopathology and psychotherapy. Jung's important self-defining early work (1912) was revised substantially in 1952, becoming
Symbols of Transformation. But I think we would do well to remember that the original version (
Psychology of the Unconscious) was Jung's fundamental statement of independence and differentiation from Freud and psychoanalysis. I feel this gives further credence to my belief that Jung's late work was about finding himself more so than about psychology.
But because for many Jungians Jung is a kind of guru or even a Christ figure, these late works are remade into sacred texts or gospels of the deepest truths. I think this attitude only perpetuates the deification (and the fallout from that deification) that Jung the man has been treated to by his followers. It further suspends the psychological attitude that is needed to better investigate and understand Jung the complex, but purely human, being. Modern "post-Jungianism" has moved from deification to near demonization of Jung the man, treating Jung as a kind of albatross that drags down Jungian psychology because of his personal failings and "sins" (mostly anti-Semitism). But this is merely an enantiodromia. Jung the human being is still not being addressed.
One last thing on synchronicity. Perhaps the best Jungian book on synchronicity was written by Joseph Cambray in 2009:
Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe. Cambray is one of the most intelligent Jungians writing today and has a background (Ph.D.) in chemistry, I think. I have been meaning to read this book, but so far have only read the first chapters. Luckily, it is available online here (from the Texas A&M digital library) as a .pdf:
http://repository.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/88024. If one is going to explore Jungianism and synchronicity today, this book is essential reading.
I don't know/remember if Cambray explores the phenomenon of synchronicity in the context of modern studies on human perception, pattern attribution, rationalization, and confabulation coming out of the cognitive sciences . . . but those studies present the real challenge to the attribution of synchronistic phenomena to some kind of natural "force" coordinating external events with personal thoughts and emotions in a "meaningful" way. I feel that these studies describe for us a human mind that is not only capable and predisposed but almost determined to attribute synchronicities to random events and subjective ideas and feelings. I don't think any Jungian theory that argues for synchronicity as a kind of natural or supernatural "principle" can surmount arguments and evidence to counter the findings of these studies.